Cataloguing nature: Smartphone app brings citizen science to HRM

A participant catalogues a plant species using the iNaturalist smartphone during BioBlitz 150. (ZACK METCALFE)

The rise of iNaturalist has been a wonder to behold these last few years. The smartphone app allows users to catalogue flora and fauna with ease, while at the same time making all photographic and locational data available to the scientific community abroad.

Perhaps you’ll document a strange beetle in your backyard and have it identified by some Vermont entomologist on her lunch break. Or photograph what you’re sure is an endangered Canadian lynx, only to be disappointed by a wildlife aficionado declaring it a simple bobcat.

Several of the experts I consult regularly swear by this app, allowing for genuine, productive citizen science as they say, harnessing the countless hours we laymen spend outdoors for the benefit of research. With fully charged phones and an afternoon to kill, dozens of volunteers can catalogue a slice of wilderness without the expense of grant money or professional time, all the while encouraging public appreciation for the organisms they encounter. Group events like these, known commonly as “bioblitzes,” were once a pen-and-paper affair for people who already knew what they were looking for, but now it’s free for anyone with cell service.

This app and its bioblitzes have already been leveraged for considerable good, most recently in a joint effort by our federal government and the Canadian Wildlife Service called BioBlitz 150. From coast to coast, a series of these blitzes have been organized to celebrate our natural as well as our cultural heritage on this most auspicious annum. In this way we are taking a national snapshot, to be built upon and compared to as time passes us by. And of course, Nova Scotia was in frame.

Through the week of Sept. 11, Halifax’s own Ecology Action Centre organized several such bioblitzes in wilderness across the municipality, their flagship locales being Point Pleasant Park and Blue Mountain Birch Cove Lakes Wilderness Area.

Jeana MacLeod, a member of the EAC, told me these two places were chosen for their stark differences. Surrounded completely by city and shore, Point Pleasant Park has become an island of biodiversity, so to speak. Its exchange of organisms with the rest of the province has been severed, offering an informative comparison with the more intact and continuous Blue Mountain Birch Cove, whose biodiversity she expects will prove superior.

Jeana MacLeod, wilderness outreach officer with the Ecology Action Centre, takes a photo of some berries at Point Pleasant Park on Friday morning. MacLeod is one of the organizers for Bioblitz Canada. (RYAN TAPLIN / The Chronicle Herald)

An Old Promise

I met MacLeod on Sunday, Sept. 17, during their final day of blitzing; participants were streaming by so steadily she was hard-pressed to pay this journalist much mind. I’m glad she finally found the time, because their decision to blitz the Blue Mountain Birch Cove Lakes Wilderness Area had a second, much more interesting reason than the one given above.

As she explained it, a little over a decade back the City of Halifax committed to protecting a sizeable stretch of land (much of which is private) west of Highway 102 as a municipal park, the very land she and I were then standing on. Otherwise, it was feared, development would encroach on this area and compromise habitat for several of our rarer species — she gave the mountain sandwort and common nighthawk as examples. Development would also prevent the area’s recreational use.

In support of this plan, she said, our provincial government designated the Blue Mountain Birch Cove Lakes Wilderness Area; the city’s promised park would then serve as a buffer between true wilderness and urban sprawl.

“The dream here is that we’d have a miniature Keji in Halifax with a backcountry (the wilderness area) and a front-country (the park) that gets more engagement and foot traffic.”

The park never came, sadly, but while plans may have stagnated, Jeana said there are encouraging signs from the city, namely their ongoing protection of the Purcell’s Cove backlands. Perhaps this is a sign of Halifax’s renewed interest in urban wilderness, she suggested. The EAC’s bioblitz at Blue Mountain Birch Cove was intended, in part, to bring attention to this unfulfilled promise and the value of the wilderness area itself, for recreation and conservation alike.

“It’s been a long process,” she said, “and the longer we continue to wait, the more expensive the land becomes. The faster we can get moving on this, the better.”

Blitzes Path and Present

I made the rounds in Blue Mountain Birch Cove following our talk, winding my way through the crowds of amateur naturalists taking stock of those marvellous woods. Some of it seemed fairly young, as forests go, but I was greeted farther in by the occasional stretch of welcome maturity.

MacLeod said the last bioblitz this forest hosted was in 2009, shortly after the wilderness area was designated, and even with the efforts of Sept. 17, very little is known about its true composition. I can confirm her frustration with the lack of maintained trails. They exist, certainly, offering a rough hike, but they’re wholly inaccessible for jogging or biking and at times can be difficult to navigate. The gentle maintenance of our municipal government wouldn’t go amiss.

I myself have downloaded iNaturalist, waiting faithfully on my phone should I ever encounter an ecological oddity. My hike long over, I now have the pleasure of opening this app and seeing, plain as day, the many dozens of entries made by participants of Sept. 17’s bioblitz. A click on any of these contributions gives rise to a photograph and small observational profile, some of them already identified confidently by experts near and far, while others wait patiently for the righteous word of scientific authority.

I can only hope that in a few years’ time we won’t be comparing these discoveries to a park-become-suburb, as MacLeod soberly suggested.

Zack Metcalfe is a freelance environmental journalist, author, and writer of the Endangered Perspective. He operates out of Halifax, Nova Scotia.